Mark Hopwood’s phone case tells you everything you need to know about him.

“Eat. Sleep. Trains.” says the slogan on the back of it. The managing director of Great Western Railway, the operator which runs trains from London to Gloucester and Cheltenham, laughs as I point it out.

“My partner got me that as a joke,” he says, and acknowledges it is “not too far away” from a description of his life.

The 45-year-old, who first started working for British Rail at the age of 17 answering the telephone in the enquiry office at Reading, is now responsible for a service that is about to undergo what he called a “transformational” change, the most significant upgrade in a generation.

Mark Hopwood

And he seemed genuinely excited by what the next two years or so will bring.

Spearheading the upgrade will be state-of-the-art new inter-city trains, some of which will come into service later this year with the electrification of the line from London to Cardiff. And, with them, Mr Hopwood promised more speed, more comfort, increased reliability, more frequency and greater capacity for the region’s rail travellers.

Gone will be the distinctive, but 41-year-old, so-called High-Speed inter-city stock.

They will be replaced by 93 of the latest Hitachi hybrid electric/diesel trains, built using Japanese bullet-train technology.

The first phase will see 57 new trains in service between London and Swansea by the end of this year with another 36 added next year to serve the South West.

Local lines, too, will benefit from the upgrade with routes like the Severn Beach line inheriting better – and longer – Turbo trains from Thames Valley. The first of these will be introduced in July, along with Oyster card-style smart ticketing.

Read More

And Mr Hopwood had even better news for passengers arriving in London on the new trains: “At the same time that we launch our new timetable with all these improvements in December 2018, the Crossrail Elizabeth Line will open up. That will take business people from Paddington to Canary Wharf in just 17 minutes and shoppers to Bond St in three minutes.”

Those are game-changing transfer times for visitors to London from the West Country.

For a railroad man who started his career working for British Rail, and in the week that Labour launched an election manifesto pledge to take railways back into public ownership as franchises expire, Mr Hopwood was understandably bullish about the benefits of privatisation.

“My view on this is that we’ve got a General Election coming up, people will make their mind up and we’ll see where we end up. But we’ve seen phenomenal growth in terms of passenger numbers, which have pretty much doubled since privatisation began,” he said.

He also maintained that franchise periods gave more long-term stability to services, taking rail travel management out of the vagaries of year-to-year Government funding.

And Mr Hopwood had a clear message for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has said that private operators “cannot be trusted with having passengers’ best interests at heart”.

“I don’t think he’s right. The private sector franchises have shown that they can bring very considerable investment. They are tightly regulated so, ultimately, Government has a lot of control, both in terms of the specification and how we deliver. As well as that, a large chunk of the issues that people want to talk about now are actually Network Rail’s responsibility and that’s already in the public sector.”

Read More

His frankness seems to indicate a no-nonsense, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin approach to his industry, indicated by the firm’s 2015 re-branding as GWR.

“We’ve been through a bit of a phase that other industries have been through,” he admitted, “where people have said some silly things like ‘we’re not here to run trains, we’re here to provide travel solutions’.

“Passengers don’t like that sort of thing. They say, for goodness sake, you’re a railway company, you’re here to run trains. We want you to do that and do that well. Why on earth should we have a brand that makes it look like we’re trying to sell soap powder?”

But Mr Hopwood is more than aware that using the GWR name brings his firm a weight of responsibility to live up to its heritage: “What’s been particularly challenging for us over the last few years is that we’ve been trying to run a full train service and work with Network Rail to rebuild the railway. And when you link the Crossrail work in London with rebuilding Reading with the electrification of the network you’ve got what a lot of people call the longest building site in Europe.

“While we don’t expect any sympathy for that, the great news is that we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, our new trains are going to deliver reliability that is at least three or four times that of the current stock.

“So we should be proud of what we do. And run a railway that we and everybody in the region is proud of.”